The New York Times reports that 53 percent of White female voters supported Trump, despite his sexist and degrading comments.

As the nation continues to dissect the polling data that led to Donald Trump‘s election, we can’t ignore the impact of voter suppression and the high number of White women voters who cast their ballots for the president-elect.

On Thursday’s edition of NewsOne Now,Roland Martin and a panel of guests discussed the effect of voter suppression and how 53 percent of White women helped him defeat Democratic presidential nominee Hillary Clinton.

Trump garnered fewer votes than any Republican candidate in 16 years. According to Martin, 59.2 million people voted for Trump, 60.9 million voted for Mitt Romney, 60 million voted for John McCain, and 62 million voted for George W. Bush.

“There is no doubt that voter suppression played a critical role in the election of Donald Trump,” he said. “This was by design for the GOP for the last six years.”

In Wisconsin, for example, Trump won by 27,000 votes; there were 300,000 individuals in the state who lacked the proper voter ID. Wisconsin voters impacted by the state’s voter ID legislation not only included African-Americans, but also older White voters, Martin said.

“Elderly White voters had to go to the DMV two and three times just to get their voter ID,” he said.

Lauren Victoria Burke responded to Martin’s assessment of the 2016 election, saying voter suppression “definitely played a critical role, but I don’t know that it played a role to [the tune of] 9 million votes.”

According to the NewsOne Now panelist, Clinton received 9 million fewer votes than President Obama in 2008.

Burke added, “When you have two candidates that have very high negatives that people do not like – and Hillary Clinton had huge negatives and no message – of course some of that is going to voter suppression, but a lot of that is the candidate from the 1990s that you (the Democratic Party) nominated, that couldn’t even beat an outsider, a no-name Senator from Illinois in 2008.

“The Democratic Party should have some sense of that. You can’t run somebody from the past.”

Another very interesting factor concerns the White women’s vote. The New York Timesreported a whopping 53 percent of White female voters supported Trump on Election Day, despite his sexist and degrading comments about them.

NewsOne Now panelist Monique Pressley, Principal of The Pressley Firm, PLLC, said Trump “became the messenger of hate, of racism, of sexism, and we can’t blame all White women” for the outcome of the election.

White women ages 18–24, “mind being sexually assaulted, they mind being [subjugated], they mind being disenfranchised by what he [Donald Trump] was doing,” she argued. “It was their mothers who don’t mind it – That’s who voted. It was the women who did not vote for McCain who were older than that age group (18–24) who did not vote for Romney [who] voted for this man.

“This is the housewife who doesn’t mind being talked to that way because that’s the way her husband has been talking to her for the last 25 years anyway – that woman voted for this man,” Pressley said.

Watch Roland Martin and the NewsOne Now panel discuss the 2016 election results in the video clip above.